For Nothing
by Eleutheria Wolf
Summary: Mystic Force. The red ranger's childhood was far from a walk in the woods.


When he is three, his favorite place in the park is not the slide, or the jungle gym, but the faerie's nest in the flower bushes. It will be several more years before he can tell anyone about what he sees there, about the little people that dance in the roses, but his foster mother watches him warily, more and more certain that her ward is not normal.

When he is four, he is taken to a shrink for telling his adoptive mother about the kindly troll – or maybe a goblin? – in his dreams, the one where things are exploding and a battle is raging, sending him through a portal to the human world. And then insisting it was all real and it really happened. And then proceeding to run away in order to find the troll (goblin? troblin? goll?). Within a month he is back at the adoption agency, being teased by the older boys, and wondering what he did wrong.

When he is six, he sets a book on fire when it is thrown at him by a fed-up foster mother, and it falls to ash before it ever hits him. The woman is terrified, and practically throws him in the car and back into the orphanage, forgetting in her terror how she had just tried to hurt a child. When later asked, he goes on a whole speech about it was his magic that did it, and his mother is a really beautiful ice sorceress, and someday she's going to teach him how to use his magic really well- and he is back with the teasing boys again. This time, for the first time, he hits back. The boy he hits falls back, nose broken, and he looks at his fist in wonder, amazed at how much better and easier this is than any magic.

When he is seven, he is sent back from his fifth home yet, for trying to introduce his adoptive sister to the hobgoblin in the pond out back. When she called him crazy and said there were no such things, he was just lying, he's imagining things, the old wound is torn open, and he shoves her into the pond. He is not teased this time when he returns, because the other boys know him well, and his brawling prowess is legendary. He is adopted and fostered less and less, as word gets around, and nobody wants the crazy violent kid who believes in fairy tales. More and more he wants to just forget, but hope holds out in him, and the foggy half-truths and memories nag at him more than ever. He clings to them, but slowly, slowly, they are slipping away.

When he is ten, he gives up, and never mentions the faeries or the trolls or the elves or the hobgoblins or the dragons or the magic ever again. Instead, he focuses on becoming the meanest, toughest, roughest fighter he can. He's a survivor, he is told by one older girl, slightly kinder than the rest. He keeps that phrase clutched tight in his heart for the rest of his life, becoming the epitome of a survivor, able to take on anything. He is tough as his leather jacket, sharp as his several inch long pocketknife, and unbreakable as steel. But somewhere deep inside, in a place the outside world can never see, a wounded child cries for lost dreams and with them, lost innocence.

When he is eleven, he is adopted, and puts anything out of his mind but his parents, his new family, his new sister, out of his mind forever. His new mother is gentle and his new father kind, his sister sweet and loving, but somewhere in his heart, he can not get the image of a beautiful sorceress out of his head, lovely and wreathed in white.

When he is fifteen, he has a series of dreams about the time when he showed a one-time friend a beautiful show of magic sparks, just before said friend was killed in an accident. In reminiscence, he tries to recreate the scene and fails drastically. He can't even create a glow. It horrifies him, when as a child, he found it easier than breathing to create wild and magnificent displays. His last remaining proof, the proof that he is not crazy, that magic is real, has vanished. His parents are concerned when he cries himself to sleep for a week, and they debate in urgent whispers whether or not to take him to a doctor, a psychiatrist. Then, one morning, he gets up and pretends it never happened. In his mind, he makes himself forget that he ever knew anything but his parents, who he loves, despite them never being around. The wounded child withers and dies, retreating to some hidden corner of the soul, never to be heard from again within its cocoon of scar tissue.

When he is twenty, he is sent off on his beloved, trusty motorcycle to his sister's, in a small city called Briarwood. In passing, his mother mentions that this was actually the city he was found in, abandoned, as a baby, and his heart gives a small, longing quiver. Instead, he shrugs nonchalantly, and heads for his sister's. On the way, his bike breaks, he sees a nice, park-like area, and he stops there, as it reminds him of a park from when he was young. (His mind blocks the fact that it is in fact the same park, and how he used to play with the faeries in the bushes over there. He blocks out that he once believed in faeries. He blocks out everything. He has forgotten.) A crowd has gathered, and he listens with one ear to the old man's story. When no one volunteers, he snorts in disgust at these scared sheep-people and offers. The posh jerk that tells him 'the facts' is the recipient of a mental one-fingered salute, and he turns away, secure in his knowledge that spookies and magic and bumps-in-the-night aren't real all. (Something in him begins to open its eyes, roused by all these thoughts of the _m-_word.) A tomboyish, decently attractive girl, around his age, offers to go with him, along with her goofy redhead friend, and they set off. At face value, he is dismissive of these cowardly other kids, and begins to think that he isn't going to like living in Briarwood much.

And then things begin to happen, and it's only in the safety of this ridiculous 'sorceress's house,' this 'Rootcore,' that he remembers how nonsensical this all is, and tries to run, to leave. When he fights the strange creatures, he is all violence, but something in the back of him has woken, and muses on both the fact that he is both out of practice in brawling, and the fact that this would be so much easier if he would just use his magic already. But the wounded child is panicking now, its warning demands loud and frightened. This is too much for him, the magic, the legends, the sorceress is too eerily similar to his childhood vision of his white lady-mother, and were it not, ironically, for the immediacy of needing to protect himself in the fight, he probably would have broken down or run away by now. All his carefully created barriers against hurt and dreams are being destroyed, one by one. He is going to fall apart with denial and longing, as one by one the others explode with power, just as he used to, though the wounded child denies it evermore frantically. And when all is said and done, and his magic still hasn't come, he leaves, denying that magic itself has ever existed for him. Ever.

Because that would mean he was right, he was right, he was right all along.

And he that suffered years of torment, shrinks, pitying looks...

For nothing.


End file.
